Human Embryos With Three Parents

British medical researchers are working on growing human embryos that would have three parents: the father’s sperm, the mother’s egg nucleus, and another mother’s egg cytoplasm. In The Daily Telegraph, Richard Alleyne writes:

IVF often fails in older women because there are abnormalities in the outside of their eggs, known as cytoplasm, which surrounds the nucleus.

The team at St Mother Hospital in Kitakyushu, Japan, believe one way around the problem would be too implant the healthy nucleus – which contains most of the information to produce a baby – into the cytoplasm of a donor, usually a younger mother.

The team successfully did this in 31 eggs and of these seven formed “early stage embryos” when injected with sperm in a test tube.

Link via Popular Science | Image: NIH